About me
Hi, I’m Simon, and I live in Montréal, where I work as a backend COBOL & Java dev. Most of my work is done in Java, where I write automated testing pipelines in Jenkins for mainframe applications. I also write COBOL programs and JCL jobs to help with the mainframe side of automation.
I am driven by my curiosity. I really enjoy learning about new things, be it the latest technologies or old ones from the 80’s, and understanding how they work from top to bottom. From mastering the Java Streaming API to understanding IMS database calls in COBOL, passing through the latest DevOps practices and the latests cloud-native software, there’s no limit to what I want to learn about.
Altough I was trained, and now work, as a programmer, I also love networking and infrastructure, spending most of my free time working on my homelab, setting services and distributed computing in my Kubernetes cluster. I’m a strategy game aficionado, real-time or turn-based, and love racing sims. My passion for netwroking actually started when I first hosted a Minecraft server on an old Pentium 4 PC for my friend and I back in high-school.
My love for tech is reflected in my musical taste; I am a big EDM fan, mostly listening to progressive house and future bass, with a bit of lounge peppered in there.
Aside from tech, I have a green thumb, my living room is filled with plants, from succulents to the tomatoes I grow in my indoor hydroponic garden. I also enjoy biking and alpine skiing a lot.
My PC
- Ryzen 7 2700 with 32Gb of DDR4
- NVIDIA RTX 3090 Founders Edition
- 2TB Adata NVMe SSD
- NZXT Kraken X63 RGB cooler
- Dual booting :
- Windows 11 for games
- Fedora KDE on Wayland (the 3090 makes it really fun and simple, yes)
- All wrapped in a nice Fractal Design Meshify C Mini
My homelab
- Dell R710 with dual Xeon E5640, 120GB of ECC DDR3, dual 10Gib SFP NIC, running Proxmox
- Dell R610 with dual Xeon E5640, 16GB of ECC DDR3, dual 10Gib SFP NIC, running Proxmox (owned by a friend)
- i7 3770 system with 32Gb of DDR3, running TrueNAS Scale
- i7 3770 system with 16Gb of DDR3 and a Asus GTX 1070 Strix OC for media transcoding
- 2 x Raspberry Pi4 8GB running Raspian 64bit, with vanilla Kubernetes
- Mac Mini (Late 2014) i5 4260U, 4GB DDR3, running Debian 11 with vanilla Kubernetes
- Lenovo ThinkCentre M75Q Tiny, AMD Ryzen 5 Pro with 16GB of DDR4, running CentOS and vanilla Kubernetes
My network
- Qotom mini PC with a Celeron J1900, 8Gb of RAMm quad 1Gib NIC running OPNSense
- Linksys LGS308 1Gib managed switch
- D-Link DGS-1100-8 1Gib managed switch
- Ubiquity Unifi AC-Lite access point
- Cisco Catalyst 2960S-24PS Gigabit POE switch